Posted on 09/20/2016 1:41:50 PM PDT by ebb tide
With Burning Concern: We Accuse Pope Francis: The Remnant & Catholic Family News - I of III
With Burning Concern: We Accuse Pope Francis
"The culminating event that impelled us to take this step was the revelation of your 'confidential' letter to the bishops of Buenos Aires authorizing them, solely on the basis of your own views as expressed in Amoris Laetitia, to admit public certain public adulterers in 'second marriages' to the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion without any firm purpose of amending their lives by ceasing their adulterous sexual relations. "
From Michael Matt, Christopher Ferrara & John Vennari
A Joint Declaration from The Remnant and Catholic Family News
(Posted in three parts. What follows is Part I)
September 19, 2016 Feast of Saint Januarius in the Month of Our Lady of Sorrows
Your Holiness:
The following narrative, written in our desperation as lowly members of the laity, is what we must call an accusation concerning your pontificate, which has been a calamity for the Church in proportion to which it delights the powers of this world. The culminating event that impelled us to take this step was the revelation of your “confidential” letter to the bishops of Buenos Aires authorizing them, solely on the basis of your own views as expressed in Amoris Laetitia, to admit public certain public adulterers in “second marriages” to the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion without any firm purpose of amending their lives by ceasing their adulterous sexual relations.
You have thus defied the very words of Our Lord Himself condemning divorce and “remarriage” as adultery per se without exception, the admonition of Saint Paul on the divine penalty for unworthy reception of the Blessed Sacrament, the teaching of your two immediate predecessors in line with the bimillenial moral doctrine and Eucharistic discipline of the Church rooted in divine revelation, the Code of Canon Law and all of Tradition.
You have already provoked a fracturing of the Church’s universal discipline, with some bishops maintaining it despite Amoris Laetitia while others, including those in Buenos Aires, are announcing a change based solely on the authority of your scandalous “apostolic exhortation.” Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the Church.
Yet, almost without exception, the conservative members of the hierarchy observe a politic silence while the liberals exult publicly over their triumph thanks to you. Almost no one in the hierarchy stands in opposition to your reckless disregard of sound doctrine and practice, even though many murmur privately against your depredations. Thus, as it was during the Arian crisis, it falls to the laity to defend the Faith in the midst of a near-universal defection from duty on the part of the hierarchs.
Of course we are nothing in the scheme of things, and yet as baptized lay members of the Mystical Body we are endowed with the God-given right and the correlative duty, enshrined in Church law (cf. CIC can. 212), to communicate with you and with our fellow Catholics concerning the acute crisis your governance of the Church has provoked amidst an already chronic state of ecclesial crisis following the Second Vatican Council.
Private entreaties having proven utterly useless, as we note below, we have published this document to discharge our burden of conscience in the face of the grave harm you have inflicted, and threaten to inflict, upon souls and the ecclesial commonwealth, and to exhort our fellow Catholics to stand in principled opposition to your continuing abuse of the papal office, particularly where it concerns the Church’s infallible teaching against adultery and profanation of the Holy Eucharist.
In making the decision to publish this document we were guided by the teaching of the Angelic Doctor on a matter of natural justice in the Church:
“It must be observed, however, that if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly. Hence Paul, who was Peter’s subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning faith, and, as the gloss of Augustine says on Galatians 2:11, ‘Peter gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects’.” [Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 33, Art 4]
We have been guided as well by the teaching of Saint Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church, regarding licit resistance to a wayward Roman Pontiff:
“Therefore, just as it would be lawful to resist a Pontiff invading a body, so it is lawful to resist him invading souls or disturbing a state, and much more if he should endeavor to destroy the Church. I say, it is lawful to resist him, by not doing what he commands, and by blocking him, lest he should carry out his will…” [De Controversiis on the Roman Pontiff, Bk. 2, Ch. 29].
Catholics the world over, and not just “traditionalists,” are convinced that the situation Bellarmine envisioned hypothetically is today a reality. That conviction is the motive for this document.
May God be the judge of the rectitude of our intentions.
Michael J. Matt Editor, The Remnant
Christopher A. Ferrara Columnist for The Remnant and Catholic Family News
John Vennari Editor, Catholic Family News
LIBER OF ACCUSATION
By the grace of God and the law of Church, a complaint against Francis, Roman Pontiff, on account of danger to the Faith and grave harm to souls and the common good of the Holy Catholic Church.
What Sort of Humility Is This?
On the night of your election, speaking from the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica, you declared: “the duty of the Conclave was to give a bishop to Rome.” Even though the crowd before you consisted of people from around the world, members of the Church universal, you expressed thanks only “for the welcome that has come from the diocesan community of Rome.” You also expressed the hope that “this journey of the Church that we begin today” would be “fruitful for the evangelization of this beautiful city.” You asked the faithful present in the Saint Peter’s Square to pray, not for the Pope, but “for their Bishop” and you said that the next day you would “go to pray the Madonna, that she may protect Rome.”
amoris_argentine Your strange remarks on that historic occasion began with the banal exclamation “Brothers and sisters, good evening” and ended with an equally banal intention: “Good night and sleep well!” Not once during the first address did you refer to yourself as Pope or make any reference to the supreme dignity of the office to which you had been elected: that of the Vicar of Christ, whose divine commission is to teach, govern and sanctify the Church universal and lead her mission to make disciples of all nations.
Almost from the moment of your election there began a kind of endless public relations campaign whose theme is your singular humility among the Popes, a simple “Bishop of Rome” in contrast to the supposed monarchical pretensions of your predecessors and their elaborate vestments and red shoes, which you shunned. You gave early indications of a radical decentralization of papal authority in favor of a “synodal Church” taking its example from the Orthodox view of “the meaning of episcopal collegiality and their experience of synodality.” The exultant mass media immediately hailed “the Francis revolution.”
Yet this ostentatious display of humility has been accompanied by an abuse of the power of the papal office without precedent in the history of the Church. Over the past three-and-a-half years you have incessantly promoted your own opinions and desires without the least regard for the teaching of your predecessors, the bimillenial traditions of the Church, or the immense scandals you have caused. On innumerable occasions you have shocked and confused the faithful and delighted the Church’s enemies with heterodox and even nonsensical statements, while heaping insult after insult upon observant Catholics, whom you continually deride as latter-day Pharisees and “rigorists.” Your personal comportment has often descended to acts of crowd-pleasing buffoonery.
You have consistently ignored the salutary admonition of your immediate predecessor, who resigned the papacy under mysterious circumstances eight years after having asked the bishops assembled before him at the beginning of his pontificate to “Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.” To quote your predecessor in his first homily as Pope:
“The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.”
A Selective Meddling in Politics, Always Politically Correct
Throughout your tenure as “Bishop of Rome” you have shown scant regard for the limitations of papal authority and competence. You have meddled in political affairs such as immigration policy, penal law, the environment, restoring diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba (while ignoring the plight of Catholics under the Castro dictatorship) and even opposing the Scottish independence movement. Yet you refuse to oppose secularist governments when they defy the divine and natural law by such measures as legalizing “homosexual unions,” a matter of divine and natural law on which a Pope can and must intervene. In fact, your many condemnations of social evils—all of them politically safe targets—are continually belied by your own actions, which compromise the Church’s witness against the manifold errors of modernity:
• Contrary to the constant teaching of the Church based on Revelation, you demand worldwide total abolition of the death penalty, no matter how grave the crime, and even the abolition of even life sentences, yet you have never called for the abolition of legalized abortion, which the Church has constantly condemned as the mass murder of innocents.
• You declare that the simple faithful are sinning gravely if they fail to recycle their household waste and turn off unnecessary lighting, even as you expend millions of dollars on vulgar mass events surrounding your person in various countries, to which you travel with large entourages in charter jets that emit vast quantities of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
• You demand open borders for Muslim “refugees” in Europe, who are predominantly military-age males, while you live behind the walls of a Vatican city-state that strictly excludes non-residents—walls built by Leo IV to prevent a second Muslim sack of Rome.
• You speak incessantly of the poor and the “peripheries” of society but you ally yourself with the wealthy and corrupt German hierarchy and pro-abortion, pro-contraception, pro-homosexual celebrities and potentates of globalism.
• You deride greedy corporate profit-seeking and “the economy that kills” while you honor with private audiences and receive lavish donations from the world’s wealthiest technocrats and corporate heads, even allowing Porsche to rent the Sistine Chapel for a “magnificent concert… arranged exclusively for the participants,” who paid some $6,000 each for a Roman tour—the first time a Pope has allowed this sacred space to be used for a corporate event.
• You demand an end to “inequality” as you embrace communist and socialist dictators who live in luxury while the masses suffer under their yokes.
• You condemn an American candidate for the presidency as “not Christian” because he seeks to prevent illegal immigration, but you say nothing against the atheist dictators you embrace, who have committed mass murder, persecute the Church and imprison Christians in police states.
In promoting your personal opinions on politics and public policy as if they were Catholic doctrine, you have not hesitated to abuse even the dignity of a papal encyclical by employing it to endorse debatable and even demonstrably fraudulent scientific claims regarding “climate change,” the “carbon cycle,” “carbon dioxide pollution” and “acidification of the oceans.” The same document also demands that the faithful respond to a supposed “ecological crisis” by supporting secular programs of environmentalism, such as the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, which you have praised even though they call for “universal access to sexual and reproductive health,” meaning contraception and abortion.
A Rampant Indifferentism
While hardly a pioneer respecting the destructive post-conciliar novelties of “ecumenism” and “interreligious dialogue,” you have promoted to a degree not seen even during the worst years of the post-conciliar crisis a specific religious indifferentism that practically dispenses with the mission of the Church as the ark of salvation.
Respecting the Protestants, you declare that they are all members of the same “Church of Christ” as Catholics, regardless of what they believe, and that doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants are comparatively trivial matters to be worked out by agreement of theologians.
Given that opinion, you have actively discouraged Protestant conversions, including one “Bishop” Tony Palmer, who belonged to a breakaway Anglican sect that purports to ordain women. As Palmer recounted, when he mentioned “coming home to the Catholic Church” you gave this appalling reply: “No one is coming home. You are journeying towards us and we are journeying towards you and we will meet in the middle.” The middle of what? Palmer died in a motorcycle accident shortly thereafter. At your insistence, however, the man whose conversion you deliberately impeded was buried as a Catholic bishop—a mockery that was contrary to the infallible teaching of your predecessor that “ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void.” [Leo XIII, Apostolicae curae (1896), DZ 3315]
As to other religions in general, you have adopted as a virtual program the very error condemned by Pope Pius XI only 34 years before Vatican II: “that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule.” You have been utterly heedless of Pius XI’s admonition “that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.” In that regard, you have suggested that even atheists can be saved merely by doing good, thus eliciting delighted praise from the media.
It seems that in your view Rahner’s heretical thesis of the “anonymous Christian,” embracing virtually all of humanity and implying universal salvation, has definitively replaced the teaching of Our Lord to the contrary: “He that believes and is baptized shall be saved; and he that disbelieves shall be condemned (Mk 16:16).”
Simultaneously published by The Remnant. Will also appear in full in print version of Catholic Family News, October 2016 edition.
• • •
Part II to be posted Wednesday, Sept. 21 To Include... • An Absurd Whitewash of Islam • A Reformist "Dream," Backed by an Iron Fist • A Relentless Drive to Accommodate Sexual Immorality in the Church • Amoris Laetita: the Real Motive for the Sham Synod • A Grave Moral Error Now Explicitly Approved
Part III to be posted Friday, Sept. 23
• • •
This Red Pope serves the interests of the elites.
He harkens the onset of a global, totalitarian government.
there are many videos on YouTube where these men comment on the situation in the Church and society in general.
I can only read this with Richard Burton's voice... https://youtu.be/WnxJyEF4qLE
There may be some truth in this screed, but I predict that it will not help even a little bit. If anything, it will make things worse. It certainly doesn’t read like a subject advising his superior.
In 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical written in German, instead of the traditional Latin. It was entitled Mit brennender Sorge, which translates to the same phrase: "With burning concern."
More can be read about it at this Wikipedia page.
How so?
Can you give me some examples?
Did St. Athanasius make "things worse"?
Did St. Catherine of Siena make "things worse"?
That’s gonna leave a mark!
It's also in incredibly poor taste.
If this POPE was the Leader of the Catholic Church during the Crusades...WE would all be wearing man dresses now...IMHO....
bookmarked for later...
Only if you choose to differentiate between globalism and Nazism. Pope Pius XI warned against exactly the same things in Nazism that Pope Frank is supporting in gobalism.
I applaud it as an act of spiritual courage long overdue, literally speaking truth to power according to the authority and requirements of Canon law, in an attempt to save the Catholic Church from total destruction.
Here is Monsignor Fenton on the infallible safety of the Holy Catholic Church, 1949:
"It might be definitely understood, however, that the Catholic’s duty to accept the teachings conveyed in the encyclicals even when the Holy Father does not propose such teachings as a part of his infallible magisterium is not based merely upon the dicta of the theologians. The authority which imposes this obligation is that of the Roman Pontiff himself. To the Holy Father’s responsibility of caring for the sheep of Christ’s fold, there corresponds, on the part of the Church’s membership, the basic obligation of following his directions, in doctrinal as well as disciplinary matters. In this field, God has given the Holy Father a kind of infallibility distinct from the charism of doctrinal infallibility in the strict sense. He has so constructed and ordered the Church that those who follow the directives given to the entire kingdom of God on earth will never be brought into the position of ruining themselves spiritually through this obedience. Our Lord dwells within His Church in such a way that those who obey disciplinary and doctrinal directives of this society can never find themselves displeasing God through their adherence to the teachings and the commands given to the universal Church militant. Hence there can be no valid reason to discountenance even the non-infallible teaching authority of Christ’s vicar on earth. ... It is, of course, possible that the Church might come to modify its stand on some detail of teaching presented as non-infallible matter in a papal encyclical. The nature of the auctoritas providentiae doctrinalis within the Church is such, however, that this fallibility extends to questions of relatively minute detail or of particular application. The body of doctrine on the rights and duties of labor, on the Church and State, or on any other subject treated extensively in a series of papal letters directed to and normative for the entire Church militant could not be radically or completely erroneous. The infallible security Christ wills that His disciples should enjoy within His Church is utterly incompatible with such a possibility."
The Nazis gassed and burned people.
Francis is dotty, but he hasn't done anything like that and he's not about to.
The globalism he supports plans to kill billions. If you don't want to connect the dots, it's not my fault. No one can pin anything on Hillary, either, so she's innocent - right?
You gotta be kidding.
Then you obviously believe it was a good thing when Athanasius was banished for preaching that the Arians were wrong.
Thanks to Messieurs Ferrara, Vennari and Matt for compiling this record of Francis’ numerous betrayals of Our Lord and of His Church. If the fruit of this dossier is that even one more soul recognizes the iniquitous nature of Francis’ corrupt machinations and resists his wildcat opinions masquerading as authentic “magisterium”, their efforts will have not been in vain.
Pope Francis is breaking bread with the two greatest anti-Christian forces in the world today: secular liberalism and islam. One wishes to subjugate or kill us with the sword, the other with the power of the courts and legislative restrictions on our fundamental rights. They should both be unequivocally repudiated by the man sitting in St. Peter’s Chair.
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